From the early days of software development, each developer is defined by the sector he works in. In that sense, a developer who works on the back-end is a back-end developer and a developer deals with front-end is a front-end developer.
There are a huge number of professionals working in this career field. This article helps you understand who is a full stack developer and how are they different from the traditional developers.
Front-end and Back-end Developers
It is the responsibility of a front-end developer to build the user interface and the user-experience architecture of a software or website.
They have to work together with the designers to create and improve the UI/UX of software. An experienced front-end developer can precisely recognize every possible issue that might affect the user experience. He can also provide suggestions and coding solutions to make the design more attractive.
The back-end developers, on the other hand, handle the server and data side of the project. It is they who actually build the application and design its interactions with the server and database. They have to manipulate data and work with private and public APIs.
A qualified back-end developer would have a great amount of expertise in Linux/Windows as a development and deployment system. Insights on various version control systems such as GIT/SVN are also a requirement for this job.
The Rise of Full Stack Developers
The front-end and back-end developers are specialized positions among developers. As customer requirements evolved with time and became more complex, a team of engineers started to create helper libraries and frameworks for the software development process.
One of the most common examples of such a library is JQuery. This library made JavaScript development in the browsers much easier and feasible. Some other popular examples are AngularJs, Knockout, Backbone, EmberJs. Similar progress was happening in the back-end technologies as well. Popular frameworks introduced in this sector were Zend, Symfony, CakePHP for PHP and CodeIgnitor for Ruby on Rails.
With such advancement, emerged a new category of developers, the full stack developers. These new set of developers blurred the lines between back-end and front-end developers. One of the crucial factors behind the popularisation of this role was the rise of startups. These jack-of-all-trades developers can provide full package and work cross-functionally on the entire technology stack of the organization. Both developers and companies benefit from this arrangement.
If this career interests you, join a Full-stack developer course and acquire the skills required for this job. As a full stack developer, you will be expected to have a fair amount of proficiency in technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Python, Ruby, MySQL, MongoDB, etc. Obviously, a full stack developer course will help you make this process faster, but it is also important to have some practical experience in them before entering the industry.
